How Groas AI Autonomous Agents Protect Margins and Replace Marketing Agencies with David Pourquery

0:00 I think 95% of marketing agencies are effectively complete scammers, right? Complete Cowboys running, running a very bad operation that leaves their customers in a very bad spot. There's a lot of reasons for that, right? But if you look at how a marketing agency would work, what they would do, they would go spend a lot of money on outreach, paid ads trying to acquire that customer. And the second they've acquired that customer, almost in all cases, what they're going to do is they're going to hire some freelancer, probably from a third world country or you know, where they can arbitrage the, at the cost of Labor and basically get them to do all the work.

0:30 And they just then collect the difference between what they pay the that freelancer who then manages essentially a lot of their accounts and does very, very subpar work because they're poorly incentivized. And then the agency owner, whatever sort of sits back before. We dive back into today's conversation.

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1:50 If you've been thinking about it, sometimes the best investment you can make ease in yourself. Welcome to the King Dems podcast, where we share the stories of extraordinary people and dissect hot, relevant topics that shape our world. From visionary leaders to trailblazing creatives, we uncover the mindset, strategy, and grit behind greatness. Whether it's business, culture, or personal growth, we ask the real questions.

2:19 This isn't just conversation, it's transformation. The Kingdom's podcast, Your Next Breakthrough, starts here. Music licensing reimagined the live Ladies and gentlemen, once again welcome to the Kingdom's podcast. And today I've got with me a very special entrepreneur fighting out of Paris Friends by Wilson Francisco, United States of America. Mick, welcome David Poquery.

2:50 How are you, David? I'm very well. Thank you that thank you for the for the intro. That was very kind. OK, you, you are a man that is Chieftain, the way the business landscape is actually going to be for the, I don't want to say for the foreseeable future. You're changing it already, right? Your changes the landscape and you know, leaking out your body of work for me. I am actually very, very impressed and I'm going to give you your flowers while you're still alive. So David, you actually represent a right. It's a section of private equity rigor operation, you know operators CAS and frontier of AI execution. We write for managing capital at scale in a global private equity to build a full autonomous AI

3:40 system that runs Google Arts without human marketers, agencies or PC funding over $35 billion per month in art spend while remaining fully bootstrapped and founder owned. This is not very. This is execution today we are unpacking what breaks inside most marketing systems, why agencies are failing businesses at scale and what founders must understand about AI events before the bets they're good from them. Ladies and gentlemen, once again welcome David Fakery to the Kingdom spot cap and Dyer of the CFO. So, David, you have actually lived many lives, you know, from being a capital allocator to being a system builder. And of course, you've actually spent years inside private equity evaluating businesses.

4:35 The scale this is a business podcast. So what patterns have you identified repeatedly that you've seen that has convinced you that most companies actually get operations wrong, right? What is it that is broken before they become eventually financially broken? A bit of, a bit of a tough question.

5:00 I think it always comes down to to people. I think I love that often, often cases either there's, you know, and actually when I say people often leadership, right? Because the leadership will dictate the team and and the team will dictate the business. So I think that's probably the first thing that as an investor you would look at is who's running of those particular functions And even, you know, we ourselves, that's something I obsess about when hiring is the quality of the team. Is it a good culture fit?

5:27 How motivated are they? What, what's motivating them aside from earning money? Like there's a lot of things that go into that, but I think ultimately, like it's always, it always comes back to the quality of of the leadership team. I love that the quality of the leadership team, you know, the tone at the top is actually very important.

5:45 And of course, you know, when it comes to hiring, I myself, I'm an early stage founder myself, you know, just in the first year of my company and I've had to learn the lesson of hiring and buying in a very, very hard way. And it has come down to three things, mind skirts, mindset, skill set and tool set.

6:05 That is a lot of times we tend to evaluate the skill set of these individuals that we watch collaborate with, but we don't tend to evaluate their mindset, right? The mindset is for me the most important thing. Then the skill set and of course I'm them with the appropriate tool sets. And Speaking of tool sets, you have actually created an amazing tool set for founders to actually use. And you know, we are in that age where the agency model is being what I say being erased, right.

6:40 And of course because the agency model has actually helped mid businesses to bleed a lot of money, they are expensive and not as effective or efficient as the tool set that you have created. And of course yourself you have been vocal about how marketing agencies destroy value. So what is the fundamental flaw in the agency model that most founders still do not understand until it's too late?

7:06 Yeah, Yeah, it's a, it's a good question. Look, this might sound a little harsh, but I think I can say this now because. Bring it on. Full authenticity, brother. OK, I'll keep it real. I think 95% of marketing agencies are effectively complete scammers, right? Complete Cowboys running, running a very bad operation that leaves their customers in a very bad spot. There's a lot of reasons for that, right? But if you look at how how market agency would work, the what they would do, they would go spend a lot of money on outreach paid ads trying to acquire that customer. Then the second they've acquired that customer, almost in all cases, what they're going to do is they're going to hire some freelancer, probably from a

7:44 third world country or you know, where they can arbitrage the, the cost of Labor and basically get them to do all the work. And they just then collect the difference between what they pay the that freelancer who then manages essentially a lot of their accounts and does very, very subpar work because they're poorly incentivized. And then the agency owner, whatever, just sort of sits back.

8:01 Now obviously there's different levels to that, right? You have some agencies who are a lot more involved. But typically, I think that's the big problem as well. The economics often leave the businesses they work with in a bad spot because they lock those businesses into long term contracts, right? A minimum of three months, minimum of six months. And if you break and you want to stop working with us, then you're going to have to pay an extra fee. So that already leaves things a mess. On top of that, to even start, let's say a marketing agency, you could start 1:00 tomorrow with 0 credibility, 0 credentials, 0 whatever you could start want to start taking on customers tomorrow, You can

8:35 make up some testimonials and just get going. There's no governing body. There's no this or that The. Regulatory, yeah. I would say and look, there's a lot of exactly, exactly. So yeah, there's a lot of marketing agencies in the world, a lot more than you or I would would think to exist. And I think over a long enough period of time, Grow Ass will put a lot of them out of business because instead of paying your marketing agency, you know, 3-4 KA month to set up your ad campaign once and do nothing, right? Literally do nothing.

9:03 You can pay Grow as 10% of that and it will do everything and it'll work for you 24/7. That's because we're using autonomous AI to do it. So yeah, I think that a lot of them are going to be in a lot of trouble. What we're seeing though is a lot of them are just plugging in their customer campaigns into Grow as not telling their customers anything and then just charging them the difference.

9:25 That's what we're now seeing. Wow, You know, one of the major issues or major controversies about AI is AI versus humans, AI replacing humans. And of course, you've actually viewed an AI that replaces humans. So most founders actually viewed tools that assist humans, right? How do you feel about you building AI agents that replaces humans entirely? And of course, what problem was so sleepy that that augmentation was not enough?

9:57 The question so look, grow as so V1, which was not full autonomy was like a recommendations tool, right? So it was something that people actually had to come in and use and it was great. And it was there to increase people's performance. And then whilst we had that, we're like, OK, fine, we can actually do more.

10:11 And that's when we started building for full autonomy, which is where we're at today, which is something that genuinely replaces humans. It's not something you have to use or log into or whatever, whatever. It just runs and scales your campaigns for you better than even a, a team of marketers can, right?

10:27 That's where we're at right now. There's a lot of work to get to this point, but we're now there. Now the reason some people say, oh, is this is this a bad thing? It's actually a good thing because for the reasons I was saying earlier, 95% of the industry is, you know, is filled with scammers. Like we know this by the way, because our biggest customer segment is people who fire their agencies and then move everything to grass. OK?

10:52 During that process, we get to see what the hell these agencies did to these poor customers. And it's a complete shit show nightmare. And I'm like, this is insane. Like my grandmother who's 90 years old, God bless her, she could do a better job at running these campaigns. And some of these agencies have done right.

11:08 Like it's insanity some of the stuff we've seen. And these agencies will charge them 510K15 KA month for this. So I think overall it's probably a benefit to business and to humanity, I would say. Whoa, so fully autonomous AI versus AI powered marketing. So there's actually like a lot of noise out there around AI marketing tools.

11:30 There's a lot of garbage and you know, we believe a world of imperfect information. You know, I studied economics with my first degree and you know, when we're being taught about the defense House of markets, you have the perfect markets, you have imperfect markets. In the perfect markets, there's type of information, you know, everybody's well aware of the various factors, you know, that impact the market, but that is not attainable in the real world, right? And of course, like in simple terms, like what is the difference between automation, augmentation, true autonomy and like does that distinction actually matter financially? Yeah, because look, we had, that's what we started off with, right?

12:17 It's just like, OK, grow ass was pulling in lots of data and giving insight and saying, OK, maybe you should do this. You should add this keyword, remove this keyword. We also did a whole bunch of stuff around dynamic landing pages, which massively increased conversions. We're doing all this cool stuff. But what we noticed was that people like, this is great, but can you not just do it for me?

12:35 And that's when we're OK, there's something here and that's when we take it to the next level. Now, as far as I'm aware currently, right, we are recording this in February 2026. As far as I'm aware, there is nobody even remotely close to grow as when it comes to full autonomy and Google ads campaigns, no one.

12:51 There's a plenty of, you know, AI recommendation tools, all of these other bullshit softwares. We don't care. We don't compete in that realm. Our competition is humans, teams of humans. That's who we benchmark ourselves against. We don't look at, you know, it's not this word stream optimizer. All of these are great tools.

13:07 God bless them all the best. We don't compete that we are like our number one metric is how much better are we than humans at managing and scaling Google ads campaigns. And I tell this to my engineering team every single day. If people are logging into grow as and actually using it, then we are failing at our job.

13:24 That's not how it should work. They should connect the campaign once, sit back and then just wait for the the cash register to ring. That's that's really our business model. Well, interesting. You know, you speak very passionately about scaling. So, but then you've actually scaled to $35 billion monthly ad spend without investors. So scaling that big right with 0 VC, 0 private equity, you know, and this is full ownership.

13:58 What systems thinking mistake forces founders to believe that Excel capital is required even when it's often not required? Good question. I'm very lucky that I used to work in the investment industry, right? So I work in private equity, but even before that I actually worked in a couple of venture capital firms, right, First time as an intern, next time was like a junior analyst.

14:20 So I know and understand that world very well. I have very close friends of mine, personal friends who are VCs full time. So I know that world super well. And I think it's a very dangerous thing to do to go and raise money. I think most. Should. Absolutely yes I agree. I think unless you're doing Elon level cool shit right where you're trying to put rockets into space and you need $100 million upfront just to get the the info for that.

14:45 OK, you need money, go raise funding. But I would say if you're doing some software company, whatever, whatever, you should try and do your best to bootstrap that. And if you need to raise money, like look into alternative sources, but the VC game is mostly rigged. It's a very tough thing to do. I think it puts you more at risk than less at risk, in my opinion.

15:02 Because what most founders don't get is the second you do that deal with the devil, you are now committed to growing 20% month to month, 10% month to month, whatever it is. If you don't hit those targets, you will not be able to raise more money. OK. And then what happens is you now have a structurally unprofitable business that is burning cash every month because you're investing in growth. You're not going fast enough.

15:24 So no one wants to invest in you. And therefore you close down for business, even though you may have had a perfectly good product, a perfectly good team, all of that, all of that, you're basically a little screwed. So yeah, my thoughts on VC is I was very stubborn from the very start of grass that and we get approached by the way, by VCs 24/7. I get probably one a day.

15:44 E-mail me or or connected me on LinkedIn and I tell them to to basically go look elsewhere. So I've been very stubborn about trying to keep 100% ownership. Well, interesting stuff, you know, I like the way you frame it because myself I have a background with the peak for accounting fans. I'm an ex auditor, you know, PWCKPMG and I have had that, you know, would I say privilege, the opportunity to be able to audit different organizations, you know, across but from startups to PLCS to meet tier companies. And I see the same thing that leverage forces founders to to to make mistakes, you know, on 1st errors basically, right. And like you rightly said, it's like dining with the devil. You get it and then you'll be

16:40 forced. I've had AVC on, on this forecast report. And, you know, he said something about like what makes a company interesting to them is double digits profits. If you're not making double digit profit, right, you're not interesting to to AVC. And yeah, we understand they're in the business of, you know, growth, but it's not the natural flow for every type of pieces.

17:07 Take Uber, for example. Uber was not profitable in the past couple of years, right? They had to get that structure properly. Some companies have to iterate over time, right? And of course, when you're not in an industry that has ethical concerns versus profit concerns or what do you do, you stock in a dilemma, right?

17:27 So I really want for you to would I say expand on the the dangers of having that PC money too early, especially too early. At some point, you know, if you if you want to scale up, you have maybe very big expansion plans, it might make sense. But for me, my philosophy is having that PC money too early is a very, very big danger. I don't know what you would like to expand on in that regard. I mean, of course it is, right?

17:57 Because then you're going to be less cautious with spending because it's not your money, right? But I think ultimately the, the big issue I see is people celebrate raising money as some kind of achievement. Like you've just sold the percentage of your company at a discount for like for no reason. And let's be clear, you've done nothing. And then they, and then they parade on social media, we raise that, you know, 20-30 mil valuation. That's a nonsense valuation, right? I could sell 0.01% of grass for like, let's say AK and now I'm worth a billion.

18:26 Like, what are we doing here? So I think a lot of people don't seem to understand that. They seem to think that valuation actually means something in the real world. The only thing that matters in my opinion is what are your, what are your customers saying about your product? That's like the best predictor of success long term is, are people really enjoying what what you're building?

18:43 How's your retention? Like that's something I obsess about is are we retaining customers well enough? And if someone ever churns like I will, I will lose sleep over it. It really pisses me off. Yeah. And then the other thing as well the other people miss is there's different like classes of shares when you raise right. Yeah, exactly.

19:00 And VCs have to get paid out first. So there's so many cases where you'll see an exit of like $100 million. Exactly. Yeah. And the founder leaves with maybe a couple mil at best. And so you've just done all of that and you just got screwed over. So yeah, look, my, that's my take. I'm obviously quite anti here, but it obviously has its benefits as well. I think it's that case by case.

19:20 Yeah. And you know, I think I'd like to quickly bring in or weave in the fact that we now have a lot of cases of founders being fraudulent. At this morning, I woke up to the headline of Forbes 30 under 30 founder from Turkey. I'm not going to mention her name. No, she's female. You could go check it out. And then actually, but she actually defrauded investors awful lot of money.

19:45 And it's it's crazy. We like think valuations and all that stuff. So it gets really dirty sometimes, right? You know, coming back to the investor lens, right? We are the humans you know most consistently introduce inefficiency. Buyers waste inside a paid acquisition system. That's tough one. It's tough because there's so many variables that go into this, right?

20:11 So if you want a good, good Google Ads campaign, that's not one thing. There's like 1000 different things you need to be optimizing and tweaking 24/7. Is your landing page good? OK, what's in that? What should be in that landing page? There should be some social proof and testimonials while you're offering like there's a million things that go into just the landing page, right? Then the checkout flow then.

20:27 So that's just like the landing page side. Then inside Google Ads, there's like a million different things as well that you need to be tweaking and optimizing. Most people, I would say in Google Ads, what do they get wrong? Like the number one thing I think that I see is keywords getting the keywords wrong.

20:43 They go in and they had like 1000 keywords and like a $20 budget campaign per day. That's just complete lunacy, right? It's just like lighting money on fire for no good reason. So like if I had to sum it up, because we've seen a million different things go wrong and there's a lot you have to optimize, but typically it's people are choosing the wrong keywords.

21:00 And obviously grass does a really good job with it and helps in whatever, whatever. But that's like the number one biggest issue I think across the board. Oh, Speaking of landing page, you always need to keep tweaking things. I said tweaked something on my landing page before I I jumped on this interview.

21:15 So that speaks that hit a home run. Let's talk about the 30 to 40% of revenue deep, right. You've actually stated that e-commerce brands routinely lose 30 to 40% of revenue through avoidable mistakes. So what are the top mistakes that quietly destroyed the margin without founders even though just in?

21:39 Yeah, I mean, so the first one is what I touched on is, is keywords being completely wrong and therefore you're wasting a whole bunch of of spend for no reason. Actually, the other thing as well is negative keywords is another thing in Google Ads where most people have none and therefore you're showing your ads to people who are not going to convert anyway or getting clicks for them that people are not going to convert anyway. That's costing you money.

21:57 The other thing as well, which is quite problematic is the ad quality itself. Most humans suck at writing good, good copy. It's really hard. Now, that's obviously something that we've trained grass to do very, very well. It's a very important part of of selling things online is how well you can convince somebody to like how well you can convince somebody to actually buy your product right from cold traffic.

22:19 Not easy to do. But I think copy and writing good copy both at the ad level and the landing page level is also something that's super important. And then finally, you know what unconventional answer, but it's going to be patience, patience. A lot of people get this wrong, right? Because if you've never on Google ads before, the big mistake we see is people think, OK, I'm just going to throw 10 KA day at this and it it it's going to make me a bit, I'm going to be profitable.

22:43 No, like it takes time, right? Tweaking an offer, tweaking your campaigns until it reaches that sweet spot. Yeah, exactly. So tweaking and getting everything right and optimizing everything until it reaches that sweet spot where you're just printing money on autopilot could take months. It can take weeks.

22:58 It depends case by case, but I would say patience is a very underrated factor in the game. Patience is key. Patience is a virtue. Let's talk about trust. We are in the attention economy and people actually buy based on trust, but a lot of founders actually share that loss of control with autonomous systems. So how should leaders think about trust, ethical guardrails, and accountability when AI is making decisions faster than humans can ever do?

23:34 Yeah, well, I think it's just inevitable, OK, Because it just comes down to a, to a profit question effectively, right. Like, yeah, things aren't going to be perfect for a little bit, but in some industries they already are, right. Software engineering, we already have AI that can write code far better than humans far quicker. That's that's already happened some places taking longer to catch up.

23:51 But it's just completely inevitable that this is going to happen over time. And it becomes for business owners, it becomes like a a profit question, right? Do you want to employ 10 humans to look at something or employ an AI for 1% of the cost? It might make some errors initially, but over time it's only going to get better and better. Yeah, it's effectively that that's where the board is heading for.

24:12 For better or for worse, the trainer started and there's there's just no stopping in at this point. I'll tell you something, child Chippity is my legal consultant. You know, the best legal, the best legal consultant in the world for just $20.00 a month. I don't think any lawyer charges that. You know, I'm going to pick your, I'm going to pick your investor braid right now.

24:39 If you were still seating on, you know, the investment committee today, what would you look for in an AI company that most investors still miss out on? At what stages is it like a very under staged AI company or is it like a mid stage or like what what stages are? Interesting. So so let's break it down.

24:56 Early stage. Mid stage. Yeah, I mean, early stage, the only thing to even look at in my opinion is the founders. You invest in good founders that that's what it is, right? You have to assess the potential of those individuals. Is it a team? How well do they work together? If it's just one person?

25:10 Well, they better be very driven because solo founding, as I know myself, it's going to come with a lot of punches in the face. So that can you can you handle it well? But effectively at an early stage, the only thing to be thinking about is how good is that team? Because markets change, your products going to change like so many things are going to evolve over time that you couldn't have possibly foreseen. But how well those individuals adapt to the situations is like the only, in my opinion, determinant of success. And like, how do you assess?

25:37 How do you assess humans? That's really tough, actually. VCs typically will default to, oh, they went to a good school, therefore we should fund them, which I think is mostly BS. It has a bit of truth to it, and I get it right to an extent, but it's also mostly BS. Not everyone who goes to Stanford is going to start a Unicorn.

25:53 That's just ludicrously. Absolutely. So yeah, there's a lot of factors. Yeah, there's a lot of factors that get into it. But effectively at the earlier stages, you're just looking at the the founding team, maybe the motivations, like why they did what they want to do. If they're doing it just for money, by the way, I don't think that's actually a bad answer.

26:11 That's fine, right? If you're, if you're money hungry, maybe you're going to work harder than somebody who isn't, right? And somebody's just, and somebody's just like, you know, I want to make the world a better place, which is also mostly BSA. Lot of people say the world a better place. It's just some nonsense in my opinion.

26:25 So yeah, look into the motivations. How well do they know the problem they're tackling in my opinion is like, one thing I look at is like, you're doing this, but why? Like what attracted you to try to do this particular thing? How well do you know the space? In my case, I knew Google Ads very well from running E com stores over the years. And I knew that there was a lot that was broken and I wanted to do better myself.

26:42 So that's where it came from, right? So Google Ads was like a, a pretty natural thing for me to, to try to tackle. But if somebody has worked in chemical engineering their entire life and then tomorrow wants to start an AI for for law firms, I'm going to ask them like why they they need some good reasons.

26:57 I actually very, very much agree with you. You know, they say experience is the best teacher. It's always good to be armed with that experience. And by the way, people call me AI because my government name is AI Ademola EC member. That is my name. So I don't know what my parents saw and said a three years ago.

27:16 They must have seen something other people did not see, right? But I look at it, I have always thought like somebody who's prompting, even right from my days of the beaker accounting firms, now the LLMS are popular and he feels like, oh, AI is the next big thing. But we've actually been using AI for a long time, but we've actually been thinking in this way. So basically AI is just a multiplier. It accelerates the way in which you think. And for me, I, I feel like the people who are brilliant, efficient, who only become more efficient and the people who are, you know, the other side would also, you know, because basically AI is just a multiply.

28:01 It either multiplies, it multiplies your intelligence or multiplies your foolishness. So it depends on your value you're standing on, right. And when it comes to a founder's identity, every founder has a unique journey, right? But a lot of founders actually struggled emotionally when the systems that they have created outperformed them.

28:27 So what is that mindset shift that is required to move from being the smartest person in the room to just being the architect of intelligence? No, I much, much rather prefer to be in the second right, even architecting that it's not being in the treasury 24/7 doing things you. Know why is the minor shift brother?

28:48 Doesn't make you smart. It does. But yes, yes, also I think you need money as well to do that. And it's also, it's also hard to do because hiring, well, hiring is really hard. But yeah, I mean, I still myself, for example, will do a lot of sales calls with, you know, important customers that would possibly on board.

29:08 I don't necessarily enjoy doing that, right? I think in maybe a couple of months, hopefully I can find someone who's much, much better than me to do these calls. It was much more convincing, who knows, for them to know grow ass better than I do. Will take a lot of time, obviously. But yeah, like that's the stage I think we're at. By the way, as a company, we're still quite early. We've been going for like, what, 7-8 months now? But yeah, we're slowly going to move there. If I had more capital, if I'd raised whatever 510 mil and had more capital, I probably would have done this earlier. But yeah, that's it's, it's essential to do. It's absolutely essential.

29:38 Otherwise you don't have a business. You just have a, a job with lots of different customers, lots of different bosses you have to answer to and you don't have a business. So you need to, in my opinion, do that, get to that ASAP. That's that's what a business really is. I love that. So before I let you go, I'm going to put you through the rapid fire questions. But before there are a quiet fire questions, I remembered something you told me, you know, the first time we indeed get to meet, you told me about how grow us is just grade on the search engine.

30:07 So I'd like for you to expand on the like, like Grow us is just great. Like white fire right now on the search engine. I think probably on YouTube or like Google, the Google search engine. Oh. Right, yes, So I mean all our. For context, one thing I haven't mentioned is we still grow as we haven't done any marketing so far.

30:30 We haven't run any paid ads. We haven't really done any cold outreach. We have done nothing so far. All of our signups, all of them come from 85% of our signups come from LLMS referring grow as the best solution. So someone will type into ChatGPT, hey, how do I optimize my Google ads? And then ChatGPT will say you should use grass and then people will sign up.

30:51 So that's like that's 85% of our signups, which is great. That's fully organic. We do nothing for that. The other 15% is existing customers telling other customers, telling other their friends that whatever, hey, look, we're using grass. It's great. Just sign up. The reason this is quite, it's tough, right? We're in a difficult position because I want that number to be higher.

31:10 I should be higher than 15% of people saying, hey, the reason they don't, and I know this, I've been told this is I've asked some of our customers, hey, could you give us some testimonials And they refuse. And you know why they refuse? Because they don't want their competitors to know they're using grass or the agencies. I saw that on your websites to know these grass like. I saw that on your website.

31:34 Happens very often where they just want to keep it secret. Yes. That permits me to expose you. So guys, I've got to read what I saw on gross website. You know this client actually says to David, he says, hey David, thanks a lot for the opportunity. I really appreciate you thinking of me. This might sound a bit selfish, but grass looks so powerful to me that I'm honestly a little afraid my competitors might figure out I'm using it as that, using it against me as well.

32:03 So for now, I think I'll have to pass purely out of fear rather than lack of appreciation. Sorry about that. And of course, sorry, David, I have to expose you on the other podcast. So yeah, there you go. There you go. That happens very often. Wow it. Is one of the. Congratulations on on the success, brother.

32:22 It's, it's quite interesting what, what this LLMS do. I had a message from somebody earlier today telling you that I, I searched you on Google and do you know what Google AI is telling me? OK, two people actually detailed me today. One of them told me the AI refers to you as AI. And I'm like, OK, interested, interested. I have to start making money from this name AI. And the second person told me, guess what, Google AI is referring to you as a Joe Rogan of Africa. I'm like, wow, I never knew.

32:54 And then it sent me a screenshot, and then it put a smile on my face. So put some respect on my name. You know, the Joe Rogan of Africa. Very cool. We're shooting for that top 1% yet currently, the two podcasts, you know, are global top 2% and global top 3%. And yeah, hopefully this year we're shooting into the top 1% in the world.

33:15 Big fire round here we'll go. 5 questions, very big answers. Let us go. Are you ready to rumble? Hey, number one, what is 1 metric founders? What is 1 metric founders obsessed over? That does not matter. So off we kind of touched on it, but maybe, maybe money raised maybe. Maybe I. Don't know, is that the amount of money they're raised? OK, I'll give you, I'll give you online that I always use revenues, vanity profits, insanity. Cash is reality.

33:53 How about that? True, true, but there are exceptions. I think if your if your revenues genuinely just skyrocketing, like genuinely like just doing boom, then maybe some losses can offset it. It's you know, that's that's actually a really difficult question. I'm trying to think what I look at. OK, how about this?

34:09 How about this? Social media followers is my answer. Oh yeah. God bless you. I love that I love that I love that bro let me tell you something I, I, I, I know I know somebody who has like over 10,000 followers and LinkedIn and this girl has never made a dime. The next question of the rapid fire will be what is what metric founders ignored that decides survival?

34:37 Easy, John. John #1. Oh, OK, OK, yeah, back to the story I was telling you right. I don't have many followers in LinkedIn, but I get a lot of inbounds saying, oh, I want to I want to be on your podcast and you know, guys pay me to talk to me from LinkedIn, from socials. Yeah, right. Yeah, I don't have many followers. Instagram I probably have like 5000 followers, right? The people who have 100K plus followers but they don't make are dying off these people.

35:07 So I I very much agree with you that that metric is is a vanity metric. What is the biggest lie sold about AI in marketing? Oh, that's tough. Biggest lie about AI? Well, I mean, we are. I think when I'm what I mean, I hope we're not selling any lies. I don't think we do. So I'm trying to think of other players. Guys go to gross that AI to check either. Any lies?

35:31 It's tough. I don't know. Truthfully, I don't really look at what are the, you know, companies like. I just focus on us. That's really all my focus is on. I don't know. It's hard to say. Biggest lie about AI in marketing? OK, The biggest lie is that it won't replace humans. It will. That's my answer.

35:53 Interested in it #4 What is the hardest thing to let go of when automating growth? No, the hardest thing to let go of when you are automating growth. OK. Interview, interview, interview, interview, interview. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.